I remember crowding around my mom’s radio on cold and snowy mornings, barely breathing, waiting for the words that would give me my freedom for the day. It was the WKZO Clock Show – called that because the show was almost exactly the same every single day, eliminating the need to actually look at a clock. We knew precisely where we should be in our morning routine by what was playing on the radio. 6:43, Blue Cross commercial; 6:44, Be-Mo Potato Chip commercial; 6:45, easy listening song, usually by Anne Murray or Sergio Mendes. And so on.

On snowy days, they changed their routine to list the school closings alphabetically. It took forever to get to the letter “P”. My sisters and I would usually start arguing around the letter “K” because Kalamazoo was a bigger district and if they were closed, surely we would be too. We’d get louder…